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Don’t Think Twitter is a Media Company? Check Your Email

Like me, you probably ignore most of the email you get from Twitter. But if you happen to care about the debate over whether Twitter is a media company you’re going to have to dig through your inbox.

The latest piece on this is by Nick Bilton at The New York Times but like many pieces on this, it misses the most impressive media effort by Twitter to date, focusing on a few projects that strike me as sideshows:

Last month Twitter announced a one-stop shop for Nascar fans that corralled Twitter messages from drivers and teams at the Pocono 400 race. The Nascar-branded page that Twitter highlighted in television ads was incredibly visceral, with pictures from inside driver’s cars. Fans could practically smell the fuel from the pit.

Earlier this week Twitter continued this media experiment, announcing a Twitter-branded destination page for the Olympics.

Destination pages matter less everyday, precisely because Twitter exists. But check out your inbox and look for an email from Twitter with the subject line So-and-so and X others “have Tweets for you”. Here’s one of mine:

Twitter started sending these back in May but I only recently bothered to notice them. (Read Mathew Ingram of GigaOM on the emails, and on Twitter as media company.)

The links Twitter is recommending are really good, and why wouldn’t they be? They know who and what I’m interested in arguably better than any other service I use (except maybe Gmail.) They’re targeted to what I want specifically, which is the exact opposite of the destination page mentality.

Email might be the wrong way to send these, but it just points to the ease with which Twitter can not only be my real-time news feed, but also the curator of the biggest stories of the day, personalized to exactly what I care about.

I agree with Jared Keller of Bloomberg that Twitter is pretty clearly both a tech and a media company. (Really, any company that is just media and no tech may as well be called a dying media company).

If you want to grasp the power of Twitter as a media entity, don’t point to a NASCAR landing page. Point to its customized feed of the best stories of the day that it’s already sending to my inbox.

from BostInno http://bostinno.com/2012/07/25/dont-think-twitter-is-a-media-company-check-yo...